


Ancient and Forever

by originally



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: M/M, Period-Typical Racism, Spoilers for Broken Homes, Time Travel, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-16 12:34:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4625535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/originally/pseuds/originally
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some stray magic gives Peter a glimpse of the interwar Folly and its occupants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ancient and Forever

**Author's Note:**

  * For [linndechir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/linndechir/gifts).



> Many thanks to PerfidiousFate for the beta and advice.

What I’ve come to think of as ‘The Incident’ (capital letters and all) started, as many of the strangest things in my life tended to do these days, when I was practising a new forma on a cardboard Johnny Foreigner down on the basement range. I was merrily (ish) chipping away at the latest round of incomprehensible Latin when there was this sudden massive noise like a huge hit of vestigium, the biggest I'd ever experienced. I actually felt a bit like Obi-Wan in _A New Hope_ : it was as if I’d heard a million people all shouting at once, just for a second, before they went quiet again. My head was spinning so I closed my eyes, pressing my lips tightly shut against a wave of nausea; I hadn't enjoyed Molly's breakfast kidneys much the first time around and I wasn't looking forward to seeing them a second. Then a sensation not unlike that time Jaget had dared me to do the Ice Bucket Challenge washed over me, a blast of cold and a weird tingle as something passed through me. When I opened my eyes again, a figure—half translucent and wearing evening dress, complete with tail coat, white bow tie, the works—was walking away past one of those sadly non-ironic Keep Calm and Carry On posters. A ghost, I thought. I'd never seen a ghost inside the Folly before, so I did what any self-respecting copper-slash-apprentice-wizard would do. I followed him.

Mr. White Tie set off at quite a clip, up the stairs and out of sight. I jogged behind him, keeping my distance after that first unpleasant walking-through experience. He glided through the door leading into the entrance hall, but as I stepped through I was hit with another blast of vestigium that left me doubled over and gasping with the strength of it. When I managed to straighten up, I felt my mouth drop open. It was immediately apparent that I wasn’t in Kansas any more, and I didn’t even have my little dog with me.

The Folly had always looked as if it was caught in some sort of time warp, but now the fittings looked _new_ , or, at least, newer. The rich mahogany panelling on the walls looked lighter and brighter than it should, the brass bannisters were a shinier yellow than even Molly’s industrious polishing could ever get them now, and the warm light coming from the wall sconces carried with it the tell-tale hiss of gas. I determinedly didn’t panic; I'd seen enough _Doctor Who_ to know what was up. The question was: how had I got here? Was it just an accident, or something more sinister? And had I travelled back in time, or was this something else? Some kind of spell that provided an illusion of the past? A weird dream borne out of eating cheese toasties too close to bedtime? I hoped it was closer to the latter. No matter how cool time travel might sound in theory, I couldn’t help remembering that episode of _Who_ where Martha had had to pretend to be a maid; I didn’t imagine that my prospects in turn of the century London—or whenever this was—would be much better. No, hopefully this was something I could easily fix. But first, well. I wasn’t going to leave without at least having a look around.

I crept across the entrance hall, on my guard and instinctively trying to be quiet though I had no idea if anyone could even see me. Would I appear as a ghost to them, the way Mr. White Tie had to me? I mulled this over as I explored. This version of the Folly felt less oppressive, somehow, than the one I knew. Many of the doors were thrown open, and the atmosphere of mausoleum-like stillness and silence was gone. In fact, I could hear the clink of glasses and muffled music coming from the one door that remained mostly closed, the one that led to what Nightingale called the smoking room, though I had never been in there. I stood for a moment, trying to place the song. It was a dance band tune, no vocalist, more sedate and English than the wilder big band swing that was to come later; I didn’t recognise the band, but the style meant that I couldn’t be any earlier than about 1925. Pleased with myself and with dad’s jazz history lessons, I turned my attention to the room itself and, presumably, its occupants. Fervently hoping that no one inside would notice and feeling quite a lot like a schoolboy trying to see into the staffroom, I wedged my fingers into the crack and levered the door open a little wider.

Immediately, a haze of fragrant pipe smoke and crackling gramophone music drifted out, carrying with it a distinct sensation of the roaring twenties; like vestigia, but almost tangible. The walls inside the room were lined with glass-fronted cabinets filled with leather-bound books and the windows were hung with heavy, crushed-velvet curtains that gave the whole thing a feeling of closed-in opulence. Across from where I was hiding was a large fireplace with a shiny white marble surround with a fire jumping merrily in the grate. A man was leaning one arm on the mantelpiece and holding a glass in his other hand, half-turned away from me as he apparently pondered the mysteries of the expensive-looking gilded mantel clock. I found my eyes drawn to the fine tailoring of his tailcoat as it skimmed his shoulders and tapered down to his slim waist; that kind of fit was pure Savile Row, not your bog-standard Topman jobbie. Behind him, a number of plush, wing-backed armchairs were gathered haphazardly in front of the massive fireplace, with a number of people lounging haphazardly in them. They were all in evening dress, and were exactly the kind of horse-faced, chinless young white men you would envision in the smoking room of a townhouse in 1920s Russell Square, were you so inclined. In fact, I half expected to see Stephen Fry done up in a butler’s outfit lurking in the corner. The men were laughing and taking drags from pipes and cigars and warming snifters of brandy in their open palms, but most interesting of all were the werelights that flickered over their heads, bathing the room in their eerie glow.

These were wizards. I’d never seen so many in one place before.

“I say, Tom,” one of the wizards said suddenly, leaning forward, “that was a bally impressive trick you pulled earlier. What was it, _impello_? Mixed with a touch of something elemental?”

The fireplace man—Tom—set his glass down on the mantel and turned towards the speaker. “Yes actually, Archie, old chap. The basis was _aer_ , though I know that’s rather unfashionable these days…”

Whatever else he might have said, I didn’t hear. I was too busy staring. I _knew_ that voice, and as he turned, I knew his face, too. There in front of me stood Thomas Nightingale as he had been 90 years ago. Or… as he currently was. Christ, this time travel stuff was confusing. Anyway, he was definitely my Nightingale, despite the differences in his appearance. It wasn’t just the fact that he looked about twenty years younger than the last time I saw him, either. It was the fact that, as he spoke to the other wizard, Nightingale’s face was more animated than I had ever seen it. His grey eyes gleamed with the timeless excitement of a man who has done something cool and is now recounting that story to his mate, perhaps mixed with the over-enthusiasm of a man who is a couple of sheets to the wind. I felt as though someone had punched me. I'd seen Nightingale smile before, obviously, and I'd seen him look pleased, but in all the time I'd known him, he'd never looked quite so openly, unguardedly _happy_. It was making my heart do funny things in my chest.

The thing was, back in what you might call ‘my time’, Nightingale had been avoiding me.

Oh, he didn’t make a big deal out of it and he was nothing but polite to me at mealtimes and when we trained in the basement, but after Lesley tasered me I’d noticed a definite downswing in the amount of time he spent with me in the coach house. Before then, we’d often shared the sofa in a comfortable sort of silence, him watching the telly and me with my laptop, drinking a lager or two. After that fraught first time, the one where he’d barged in on me and Lesley and had the two of us sweating like Nick Clegg at an NUS conference, it had become a routine. It wasn’t just the rugby, either. There was the cricket, and sometimes the tennis, and an array of panel shows: _A Question of Sport_ first (which got the Nightingale stamp of approval), and then _Buzzcocks_ (which didn’t), and then, somehow, marathons of _QI_ on Dave, my feet tucked companionably under his thigh as he chuckled along with the toffy jokes and Lesley made sarky comments from the armchair.

That was why, of course. I felt it too: the ghost of her, wherever I turned. That sounds really melodramatic, but getting betrayed and electrocuted by your best mate has a way of giving you a complex. I knew that Nightingale was shaken by it as well. After all, he’d taken us both on against his better judgement, assumed responsibility, let us creep into his affections and his secluded little bubble and then we’d gone and popped it. But what I hadn’t realised was how much I had got used to _his_ quiet presence in _my_ space: his dry remarks, his perpetual bemusement at all the little quirks of modern life, and his occasional impassioned speculation about the circumstances of a particular referee’s birth. Somewhere along the way, I’d lost that automatic, cringe-inducing awkwardness of the constable forced to spend time with the man who pays his wages and had transitioned into something closer to, well. Friendly. Not exactly mates, but on a sort of mate-like trajectory, as it were. After he’d retreated back into that DCI aloofness, I’d been feeling very alone indeed.

This Nightingale wasn’t burdened with any of that baggage. He wasn't yet haunted by the defection of an apprentice and the shadow of Ettersberg, nor was he the product of fifty years or so of pottering about in a massive empty nick, the last of his kind, just him and the scary housekeeper. That would be enough to sober anyone up. I leaned in a little closer, feeling a weird and embarrassing sort of impulse to see more of this version of Nightingale, maybe to memorise every one of those smiles and document every little change. The unbridled enthusiasm with which he was holding forth about spells with the rah in the chair was lighting up his handsome face and making something in my stomach feel all twisty, something I’d been resolutely tamping down on during those nights on the sofa back in Folly Prime. I even had list of what I considered extremely sensible and logical reasons why those feelings were a Very Bad Idea, including the fact that he was a bloke, that he was my governor, and that he was a very powerful wizard who could kill me with a thought if I fucked things up. Although—between this and my thing for Beverley Brook, I was starting to worry that I had a kink.

Luckily, I didn’t have too much time to dwell on that.

“What’s all this, then?” boomed a voice behind me and I froze, my policeman’s instinct telling me exactly what I would find when I turned around. “Why are you skulking around up here, Sambo?”

I flinched, my heart dropping somewhere into the vicinity of my shoes, and then a large hand clapped me on the shoulder and I was spun unceremoniously around. I found myself staring up into the ruddy face of a hulking, uniformed sergeant, three stripes picked out in shiny gold thread on the arm of a police-issue trenchcoat of the type I’d never seen outside of a museum. He had a huge moustache that put me in mind of a walrus and an expression of intense irritation.

Shit, I thought, it’s the fuzz. I had just enough time to feel grateful that I wasn’t in my totally anachronistic uniform before I tried to come up with an explanation that wouldn’t get me either nicked or committed. Or possibly both.

“Erm,” I said, eloquently. That didn’t exactly do the trick.

The sergeant sucked in a breath and drew himself up to his full height in the manner of all sergeants everywhere and everywhen who are preparing to deliver a bollocking.

“What’s going on out here?” came a very familiar plummy voice. “Smith?”

Sergeant Smith deflated like a popped balloon. It would have been funny had I not been having some panicked thoughts about the space-time continuum.

“Found this one loitering about up here, sir,” Smith said, doffing his helmet in the very picture of feudal deference, “peeping at his betters.”

Nightingale gave me a long, searching look, during which I kept my head down and hoped it looked like respect instead of avoidance. The word _Sambo_ was chasing the word _massah_ in circles around my mind, and neither of them was filling me with confidence.

“Very well, Smith. I shall take it from here,” Nightingale said firmly. He didn’t say anything more until the sergeant had made his ponderous, disgruntled way out of earshot, and then he looked me up and down in a searching fashion and said, “You’re a practitioner.”

I contemplated lying for about two seconds before I remembered who I was dealing with. “Yeah,” I said, and let a werelight flicker briefly in my palm.

In an instant, he switched from jovial openness to all business. He grabbed my wrist and manhandled me against the door, pushing it shut. “In that case,” he said, in a clipped, icy tone that made me shiver all over, “I’d like to know how an unfamiliar colonial magician got through our wards. Who are you?”

“Grant,” I said, and immediately cringed. Apparently Nightingale turning his laser-focused competence on me switched my brain off. “Er, Grant Peters.”

He raised an eyebrow in a gesture I recognised very clearly as 'a likely story'. “And where have you come from, Grant Peters?”

What the hell was I supposed to say to that? 'I’ve come from the future, where you’re aging backwards and I’m your apprentice and I’m a little bit in love with you even though I don’t really like to admit it to myself and I think I’m having a mental break because you’re ignoring me right now'?

“Sierra Leone,” I said instead, giving it a touch of my mum’s accent. When in doubt, ‘clueless foreigner’ is usually a safe angle.

“I wasn’t aware that any West African practitioners were due to be in the country,” Nightingale said. “Nor that they had permission to be in the Folly.” His grip tightened impossibly on my wrist.

“I’m here to warn you,” I improvised. And then the thought struck me: what if I _could_ warn him? What if I could stop all the terrible things that were going to happen, that whole cascade of tragedies that would extinguish his hopeful future and leave him a lonely old man with nothing but a besotted idiot of an apprentice? I could tell him all of it, everything I knew about Ettersberg and the Faceless Man and Lesley May. Why shouldn’t I? If it could save him that pain, why shouldn’t I say screw the Prime Directive and arm him with that knowledge?

Even as I thought it, I knew I couldn’t do it. There was no way of knowing what I might fuck up about the future if I did. But bloody hell, I wanted to. I looked up at him helplessly and his eyes widened; I wondered if all of that was somehow written on my face. Suddenly, I was consumed with a desperate need to get back to my future and my Folly and my Nightingale. I focused as hard as I could on that, feeling the magical energy thrum beneath my skin, recalling that weird vestigia from before, picturing where I wanted to be, and then yanked my wrist out of Nightingale’s grip.

The world gave a sickening lurch. When I opened my eyes, I was on my knees in the entrance hall of the Folly. The dark, dull, modern Folly. Thank fuck for that. I knelt there for an embarrassingly long time until my head stopped spinning, and then stood up on shaky legs, hoping that nobody had seen me. I was just about to escape to my room to lick my wounds when the resolutely-closed smoking room door caught my eye. Glancing about in case Molly or Nightingale were lurking, I strode over and pushed it open.

Up until then, I hadn’t been sure I hadn’t just hallucinated the whole thing. A few faint strains of that dance band record washed over me as I took in the sad skeleton of a glamourous room that had once been full of life: the dust sheets covering the plush chairs, the murky glass on the cabinets, the thick layer of dust on the crushed-velvet curtains. I shivered and closed the door on that depressing tomb.

“Peter?”

He had the worst bloody habit of catching me whenever I was doing anything slightly suspect.

“Just, er, got curious about what’s in there,” I said, and turned around.

God, he looked tired. That was the first thing that struck me when I met Nightingale's concerned gaze. The second thing was that he was standing way too close to me, and I had some very fresh memories of him pressing me into this door and speaking to me firmly. I gulped.

“And is your curiosity now satisfied?” he asked. He was looking at me like there was something he was trying to puzzle out, and I saw the exact moment it clicked. His eyes widened. “Peter—”

“Don’t ask me how I did it, because I haven’t got a clue.”

“This could have had all manner of catastrophic consequences,” he said sharply. “What on earth were you thinking?”

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” I said, probably a bit too defensively.

He rolled his eyes heavenwards and then sighed. “Of course you didn’t. Only you, Peter. I’m very glad you’re all right at any rate.” He gave my shoulder a squeeze, his hand lingering there for a second or two before he snapped back into practicality. “Naturally we shall have to discuss exactly what you experienced.”

“Naturally.”

“And perhaps a refresher on—what’s the modern term? Health and safety?”

He made to turn away and I was seized with a strong impulse to keep him there. “There’s Ashes highlights on tonight,” I said, offering him what I hoped was an encouraging grin, “and I need a beer after all that. Coach house later?”

He looked at me for a long moment before his lips twitched into a small smile. “I should like that very much.”

**Author's Note:**

>  **John Smith:** You're this Doctor's companion. Can't you help? What exactly do you do for him? Why does he need you?  
>  **Martha:** Because he's lonely.  
>  - _Doctor Who_ , 'The Family of Blood'


End file.
